One is a Wanderer
In another world, 20 year old Severus Snape has sallow skin, shakes in his hands, and demons all too real haunting him through a tattoo on his arm.
In this world, 20 year old Severus Snape’s skin had a healthy glow and the demons in the form of two dead friends never haunted him quite so much. His hands still shook, but his left arm was clear save for rogue potion burns. He walked a little straighter, because in this world, the best friends he buried were not due to his mistakes; he was not burdened by death in every corner.
Instead, that burden lay on a man with his face scratched out with sharpie in photo frames and cursed on drunken nights, who betrayed his former family not once, but twice. In this world, Peter Pettigrew is hunched over, carrying the baggage of his former friends’ deaths and the knowledge of a broken prophecy, glaring between bars at passing demons, biding time.
He isn’t important in this world.
Maybe he used to be.
But that’s not Severus’s problem.
Severus is living in a world that gave him another chance in the form of an irate sister.
That letter, that terrifying, mortifying, wonderful letter that landed in his breakfast and screamed at him in the voice of a girl he knew as a Squib, changed his life. He may not know what could have been, but he had a pretty good idea. Evan Rosier, Lucius Malfoy, the Lestrange brothers. He had never been happier to be yelled at in his life as he gripped that red excuse to escape.
He had apologised right then and there, quietly, privately, because he knew Lily hated a scene, and Lily had wiped away tears of laughter and dragged him onto the bench next to her.
Sirius was much less impressed by his apology. As he should have been, Severus thought, but was slapping him really fair?
(Yes. Yes, it was.)
Blinking away tears of pain, Severus stared at the proffered hand, then at Sirius, then back at his hand again.
“Shake my hand before I change my mind, Snivellus.”
Severus did. Sirius glared at him for a moment before breaking out into the most blinding smile he had ever seen on a human face and flounced away. Severus could do nothing but blink in confusion.
The confusion only grew when Lupin approached him with an extremely awkward apology on Sirius’s behalf. After an equally awkward protest from Severus, and a pained yell of second-hand embarrassment from Potter, he found himself surrounded by many more friends than he had bargained for.
Friendship was much more complicated than he had previously thought. As it turned out, people could not typically just sit and enjoy each other’s presence, which meant his and Lily’s friendship was an anomaly. Severus could not wrap his head around this until he had to experience the Marauders interacting. They constantly had to be doing things, always, never stopping, always moving, and Severus could not keep up.
And yet, he managed to. The group may have slowed down to accommodate, or he learnt to speed up, but either way he eventually found himself somehow enjoying their presence. Lily was always with him, which helped greatly, even if he had to put up with her and Potter flirting endlessly. He found a kinship with Remus in their mutual love for learning, their relationship slowly forming into something similar to his and Lily’s, and his friendship with Sirius baffled everyone but Remus when the pair seamlessly interacted like they had known each other their whole lives.
(Peter never really liked him, but, even back then, he couldn’t seem to bring himself to care.)
As the summer rolled around and the group of friends banded together onto the platform, Severus made very sure to hug Petunia a little tighter than usual.
Friendship was comfortable, and Severus slowly lost the feeling of not belonging with them when he was included in the yearly Yule party held by the Evans, even after Lily and James got engaged; was invited and subsequently dragged to the Longbottoms’ wedding, even after the incident with the Goyles and the Longbottom Lord; was sobbed to by Remus and Sirius when Lily and James got engaged, hiding a tear or two of his own.
And yet, despite all of that, Severus was still surprised when he received an invitation to Lily and James’s wedding as Lily’s best man.
“Are you sure?” he had asked, and Lily had sighed for the millionth time that day, hugging him and telling him that yes, she was sure, and James would probably castrate him if he didn’t show up.
Severus knew the pair too well to not take that threat seriously, so he just nodded and hugged them and called Petunia.
Who subsequently told him that he was her best man too.
Severus didn’t cry, no matter how much Sirius and Remus insisted.